tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91726793338671997672009-07-24T15:04:56.777-07:002008 IN THE OTHMER VINEYARDDavid Othmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13513434149140482587noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9172679333867199767.post-72606682889701179462008-05-09T14:16:00.000-07:002008-05-09T14:18:18.157-07:00Meanwhile, back in the winery...BLOG #3<br /><br />Wine has been made for 7000 years. The first was undoubtedly the result of a gatherer in the Taurus or Caucasus Mountains coming home, exhausted, arms laden with edibles, only to find her hunter impatiently pacing about saying “so, what’s for dinner?” She hurriedly tossed the grapes she had gathered into a pot in the corner, and fixed a sumptuous feast. She forgot about the grapes, but a couple of weeks later came home from another gather to find her hunter stretched out on the sofa, the pot of grapes by his side, and a huge smile on his face. 7000 years later, Chateau Lafite.<br /><br />So wine is not hard to make. You don’t need oak barrels, you don’t need temperature controlled fermenters, you don’t need fancy yeasts, you don’t need vast filtering systems, you don’t need cobwebby underground caves, you don’t need to be French, you don’t need a degree from UCDavis. All you need is grapes—wine is made in the vineyard—a container to ferment them in and then—and this is the first lesson our hunter/gatherer learned—an airtight container so that the wine is not exposed to air. Wine—like bananas, milk, meat and peaches—will spoil if exposed to the oxygen in air. (So if you’re ever unlucky enough to only drink a half bottle with dinner, be sure to decant what’s left over into a smaller bottle to minimize its exposure to air).<br /><br />A friend once said “the magic is in growing grapes, because wine making is just chemistry.” As the son of a chemical engineer, I had to take exception—yes it is chemistry, but to say “just chemistry” is like saying Marilyn Monroe is just a hundred pounds of water with a few pounds of minerals thrown in. You can make Thunderbird, or you can make Stag’s Leap—the difference is in the chemistry.<br /><br />In fact, ten skilled wine makers using identical batches of grapes harvested from the same vineyard on the same day, will produce ten easily identifiably different wines. It’s all in how they handle the chemistry. <br /><br />So the mechanics of making wine are simple: you extract the juice either mechanically or with your feet, if they’re white grapes you separate the skins from the juice before fermentation, usually by pressing, if they are red you keep the skins in contact with the juice until after fermentation because the color comes from the skin. Fermentation is the process of converting sugar—glucose—into carbon dioxide and alcohol. Yeasts are a catalyst for fermentation, and you add yeast to the juice, or depend on natural yeasts in the air and on the fruit to do the job. Fermentation lasts a few days to a few weeks, after which you have wine. At that point it is murky, cloudy, filled with bits of skin, seeds and an occasional bee, quite raw, and hard to drink. You can train your taste buds to taste it at that point, however, and get a good indication of how it will end up. The rest of the process is clarifying the wine, and allowing it to develop its true taste and character, much as you might let a stew sit for a time after cooking to allow the flavors to meld together. Except with wine it can take weeks, months or years. <br /><br />Let’s get back to those ten winemakers. What are the variables that will produce ten distinctly different wines from the same grapes? First, the fermentation. Fermentation generates heat—which is why most modern wineries have temperature controlled stainless steel fermenters. A wine fermented at low temperatures will preserve the flowery aromas of the grapes, so the temperature of the fermentation can determine the difference between an austere, steely wine, and a soft, flowery wine. The yeast you use —and there are many choices—can alter the flavor slightly. You can ferment a wine bone dry—most fine wines are—or you can leave varying degrees of sugar. Most beginning wine drinkers like a slightly sweet wine, and grow into drier and drier wines as their palates develop, so many wine makers make some sweet wines to appeal to as many customers as possible.<br /><br />The really great sweet dessert wines, the Chateau D’Yquems, the ice-wines from Ontario, the Trockenbeerenausleses from Germany, are made from grapes dehydrated by either freezing on the vine, or by botrytis—the “noble rot”—and so have such a high sugar content when they are harvested that there is considerable sugar left when the wines reach about 17 percent alcohol, the point at which most fermentation stops. With very special handling, the alcohol percentage can crack 20 percent, but that is very rare. (Any liquor with a higher alcohol level—Cognac, Scotch, Gin, Vodka, Rum moonshine tend to be 40 percent or above—has to be distilled).<br /><br />The second set of decisions comes in the process of clarifying the wine; separating the wine from the lees, the dead yeast cells, the bits of skin and that dead, but happy, bee in the bottom of the container. The lees impart a flavor, and some winemakers will deliberately let the wine sit on the lees for months, and stir them up from time to time, to capture that flavor. Others will siphon the wine off the lees as soon as possible.<br /><br />And finally, there is the aging process. Here the two main variables are “how long?,” and “in what?” As an often broken rule, white wines are aged for months in stainless steel, and red wines for years in oak. Oak barrels—and of course, there are many kinds of oak—impart a subtle oak flavor to wine. French Limousin is the traditional standard, but some winemakers are partial to Yugoslav or Spanish oak, and many Australian winemakers like Pennsylvania oak, go figure. Each variety adds a different flavor, and the length of time the wine is in oak affects its flavor as well.<br /><br />To add to the complexity, oak barrels lose their ability to impart their flavor to the wine after three or four uses, but continue to change the wine because a minute amount of air gets through the wood and, subtly, matures the wine. Similarly, a tiny amount of air gets through a bottle’s cork and helps high quality red wines age. Yes, too much air spoils wine, a tiny bit matures it.<br /><br />By the way, there are people who make their living going from vineyard to vineyard and scraping off a thin layer of wine soaked oak from the inside of barrels, thus exposing new oak, and giving the barrels another three to four years of life. <br /><br />So it’s easy to see how our ten winemakers can each make a different wine from the same grapes.<br /><br />In our small winery right now, we have three vintages (2005, 2006, and 2007) undergoing the clarifying/flavor melding process. There are certain processes that have to get done—stirring the lees or siphoning wine off the lees, for example—but there’s no rigorous schedule. Like snakes that only eat once a month or so, it doesn’t really matter if we stir on Monday or on Thursday. <br /><br />So during the winter Russ Gaul, the one-handed Episcopalian minister’s son, Nixonian Republican, and one time cardboard box salesman turned Unitarian and de facto Democrat, and Mike Carpenter, the long bearded—the Mexican pickers refer to him as “Osama”—Republican, lawyer and sailor, also Unitarian and de-facto Democrat and I gather intermittently to check on the wines, and occasionally do some bottling. <br /><br />Last time we were in the winery, I bottled the 2005 Cabernet/Merlot/Cabernet Franc blend that, faux de mieux, will be the red we’ll serve at our opening reception on June 11, 2009. I’m still working on the whites.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9172679333867199767-7260668288970117946?l=www.pa59ers.com%2Fdavid%2Fwine%2Findex.htm'/></div>David Othmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13513434149140482587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9172679333867199767.post-88262687644366518412008-05-09T14:09:00.000-07:002008-05-09T14:13:06.517-07:00Pruning, Part IIBLOG # 2<br /><br /><br />Wine growers have forever argued about quantity versus quality. The conventional wisdom has long been that they are inversely related. Like Van Gogh, you have to suffer to produce great art, a great vine has to suffer to deliver a pitifully small amount of great wine. <br /><br />That may once have been absolutely true. But like so much else in our lives, the more we learn, the more we realize that it’s not quite so simple. In 2007, we had a small crop, and very good quality. It turns out, however, that the small quantity was due to 2006-07 winter damage, and the high quality was due to exceptional weather during the summer of 2007—weather that allowed for optimal fruit growth, minor disease threat, and a long, dry harvest period that allowed flavors to concentrate in the grapes. We also had a small crop in 2004, but the quality was sub-par that year because both the winter of 2003 and the summer of 2004 were nasty—the winter had dramatic temperature swings, the summer unrelenting rain. <br /><br />What we are now learning is that vines are like people—they have different strengths, they respond to different stimuli, they are capable of delivering different crops. One vine is simply physiologically able to deliver more pounds of fruit of high quality than the one right next to it, despite the fact that both are the same variety, the same clone, the same rootstock, planted at the same time, and pruned, tended, and sprayed the same way. The grower’s task, therefore, is similar to that of a good teacher, parent or boss—insofar as possible, treat every vine as an individual, set a quality goal, and then try to maximize the quantity of fruit at that quality level for each vine. In practice, of course, that’s impossible, but you do get to the point where you can tell from the look of a vine as you prune it in the dead of winter—its shape, its vigor, the cane size—whether you have to prune it hard (and settle for a smaller crop) or allow it to carry more fruit. Similarly, you can look at a vine in late July and see immediately that it simply hasn’t developed enough strong foliage to ripen all the fruit that’s hanging on it, and force yourself to “drop” some of the fruit, so that all of the vine’s energies will go into ripening the remaining fruit.<br /><br />You have no idea how hard it is to drop fruit in July.<br /><br />And don’t get me wrong, while all that is going on, there’s time for your mind to wander, it isn’t totally focused on the pruning. There’s an Amish farmer a few miles away from whom we buy produce in the summer. Ike Stoltzfus, or one of his many kids, is usually in the store, a small room with shelves for the produce, a refrigerator with butter and cheese, a counter with a bell, a scale and a cash register, and a blackboard with aphorisms and announcements. For the most part, the fruit and vegetables are grown on their farm, but occasionally they buy from neighbors. One day last summer I was in the store and Ike’s 10 year old daughter was behind the counter. I was buying corn, and, as you know, it’s hard to know if an ear is good just by looking at it, so I asked the girl “how do you pick the ears you eat?” She looked at me incredulously, and said “with our hands!” As I was gathering my stuff, she looked at me and said “if I wasn’t here, what would you do?” I said “well, either I’d leave the money I owe you on the counter, or I’d leave you a note and say I’d pay you next time. What would you have me do?” Again she looked at me with amazement and said “Ring the bell!” Finally, I picked up some pears—it was late in the season—and said “Are these your pears?” This time I got a sly smile: “They are now!” she said. <br /><br />If only I could get her to apply to Andover, she’d get in in a nano-second.<br /><br />Back to the vineyard. We’re also learning more and more about disease control, weed control, and how certain weather patterns may affect the fruit weeks hence. For example: the slightly ratty looking vineyard with a certain amount of weeds poking up among the vines may be far healthier than the vineyard with no growth whatsoever between the vines, or between the rows. Those immaculate rows look beautiful—lush green vines against the brown earth and blue sky, but it’s taken a huge amount of chemicals to keep the weeds and ground cover in check, and, more important, weeds provide nutrients to the vines, control water run-off, and provide habitat for beneficial organisms (as wellas the occasional wasps’ nest). <br /><br />Which leads to a truism that still stands: wine in made in the vineyard. The best a winemaker can do is not screw it up. The flavor is in the grape, the character is in the grape, the surprise is in the grape. All the winemaker does—from the grower’s point of view—is take this great gift that is entrusted to him or her and simply by fermenting and clarifying the juice, transform it into great wine. It may explain why winemakers are often so, well, crabby, and why most of them finally succumb to the desire to grow their own grapes. <br /><br />I would be remiss, here, if I didn’t say that most grape growers also, finally, succumb to the desire to make their own wine—how hard can it be, they say, and why should I entrust these jewels I’ve spend a year cultivating to some bozo who can ruin them in a fortnight?<br /><br />The result, of course, is a bunch of brilliant winemakers who can’t grow crab grass, and a bunch of virtuoso growers who couldn’t get a decent glass of orange juice from a perfect Florida juicer.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9172679333867199767-8826268764436651841?l=www.pa59ers.com%2Fdavid%2Fwine%2Findex.htm'/></div>David Othmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13513434149140482587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9172679333867199767.post-61045304779711459282008-02-11T12:29:00.000-08:002008-02-11T12:31:35.552-08:002008 IN THE OTHMER-BARDEN VINEYARD<em>On Thursday evening, June 11th, 2009 Quinn Rosefsky’s exhibit of PA59ers art works—broadly defined—will launch the celebration of our having left Andover 50 years before. “Art” is so broadly defined that some of Maureen’s and my wine will be served at the opening. Since at least some of that wine—the whites—have not been made yet, I thought I’d take you through a year in the vineyard—to introduce you, as it were, to what you’ll be drinking. I’ll post new pieces to the blog every few weeks. The year in the vineyard starts in January.<br /></em><br /><br />Like spring training, when every team will make it to the World Series, the first day of winter pruning is wonderful! As you look out over the tangle of leafless, fruitless, brown vines, your mind’s eye can see them all green, laden with ripe purple or green fruit, each bunch ready to be converted into wine that rivals Chateau Lafitte, or even better, California’s Dry Creek Vineyard (owned by Dave Stare, PA ’58). <br /><br />From the grapevine’s point of view, however, it’s all about sex—a grapevine’s vision of the world is every green spot covered with vines, and its mission is to propagate itself ceaselessly and shamelessly to achieve that vision. To insure reproduction, it covers its seeds with sweet, delicious grapes designed specifically to convince every passing bird to eat them, digest them, and excrete the seeds on every fertile spot imaginable.<br /><br />So the vine’s goal is to maximize the volume of seeds, and it adds the fruit only because birds don’t like dry seeds. If we didn’t intervene, the vine would grow helter-skelter along the ground, and climb every tree, building or post in sight producing a huge, leggy plant with an immense number tiny grapes—seeds barely covered with enough skin to attract the birds.<br /><br />The wine grower’s goal, in contrast, is to minimize the volume of seeds, and maximize the volume of sweet, juicy, and above all complexly flavorful fruit. <br /><br />So we prune. We severely limit the amount of vine growth and confine it to a trellis so that the vine will put its energies into making a few, good grapes, so that we can keep them healthy by managing them throughout the summer, and so that we can pick the grapes without having to climb the trees.<br /><br />A prototypical vine has three parts: a trunk, arms that grow horizontally from the trunk, and canes that grow vertically from the arms. The canes are where the leaves and the grapes are, and each year’s crop comes from a new set of canes. In the textbooks, the canes crow straight up, six or so inches apart, and stay where they’re meant to be. Since the canes can’t read the textbooks, they seldom grow straight up, so right after the harvest in the fall, the vines are a mess of intertwined canes, leaning on each other in exhaustion from the work they’ve done all summer. The pruner’s job is to make sense of the mess, to pick the four to six canes—which will become next year’s horizontal arms—from the two or three dozen on each vine that will produce the best wine for the next year. All the other growth—about 80 percent of the total—are cut off and discarded. <br /><br /><br />Pruning is also a kind of report card on the past year. If the trellis is full and the canes are neatly spaced, it’s likely that you read the vine right. If there are expanses of space with no vertical canes at all, it means disease, winter damage, or bad pruning judgment. Winter damage generally comes from a sudden drop in temperature. The vines can tolerate temperatures as low as minus 10 degrees, but if there’s a 40 degree drop overa few hours from, say, 65 to 25, it can cause serious damage. And if there’s a freeze in May after the buds have come out, it can take out an entire crop. The vine will survive, however, because it has secondary and even tertiary buds that will ensure the vine’s survival—without grapes—so that it can wait till next year. Just like spring training.<br /><br />Unlike Ronald Reagan’s redwoods, if you’ve seen one grape vine, you haven’t seen them all—each is different, each poses a unique challenge. Pruning requires judgment, perseverance, strength, the idiotic desire to spend long hours in the cold, problem solving skills, the crazy urge to tackle the next vine even as you look back at the masterpiece you’ve just finished, and above all, the ability to appreciate and be inspired by the strange and wonderful things that nature does. That said, there is a certain repetitiveness to the clipping which can be either soothing, or drive you out of your mind.<br /><br />So that beautiful line of lush green vines you see in mid-summer, six months later is just a trunk, two arms, brown, denuded, almost dead looking, but gathering energy to burst into that beautiful line of lush green vines you see in mid-summer.<br /><br />Again, spring training—you’ve got a lot of raw talent on the field, and it’s the manager’s job to figure out which individuals will make the best team—sometimes it’s the huge kid with the great arm, sometimes it the scrawny one who brings spirit to the group. Always, it’s a judgment call.<br /><br />So it is with grapevines. The pruner knows that there is a $150 bottle of wine in each vine. It’s his and her job to figure out which canes will deliver that bottle, and which, like some ballplayers, look great, but come up dry.<br /><br />Sometimes we get it right.<br /><br /> David Othmer<br /> January-February, 2008<br /><br /><br /><br /><em>A Technical Note on the Trellis. The long rows of grapes you see in a vineyard are on a trellis. There are many, many different forms of trellis, each attempting to achieve the same three, contradictory goals—to maximize the quality of the grapes, to maximize the volume of the grapes, and to minimize the amount of effort required to manage the crop. The different kinds of trellis reflect different attempts to solve the unsolvable problem. The most common trellis is a series of posts about six feet high and 25 feet apart, several hundred feet long, which hold five to ten horizontal wires to which the vines are attached, and which hold the canes upright. The space between the rows is generally six to nine feet wide (to accommodate tractors). The space between vines within a row is generally three to eight feet. The most common trellising system is to have a trunk rising about two feet off the ground, then two “arms”, extending horizontally in each direction along one of the wires. Each horizontal arm has a series of “canes” spaced 4 to 8 inches apart that grow vertically. Each cane bears one or two bunches of grapes, has 20 to 30 leaves, and 10 to 12 very small buds. This year’s buds are next year’s canes—next year’s fruit bearers, and next year’s arms are chosen from this year’s canes. In the textbook vineyard, there will be a cane growing vertically every 4 to 8 inches, every cane will have one or two bunches, and every vine will have between twenty and forty canes, depending on how far apart they are planted. <br /><br />A trellis has fixed wires, to which the trunk and arms are attached with plastic ties (in the old days growers used twine), and movable wires—catch wires—that keep the canes from falling over, and try to keep them growing straight up. The catch wires come in pairs, and the canes are made to grow between them, thus keeping them from falling over. A six foot trellis has two, sometimes three, sets of catch wires, which get pinched together over the season to keep the canes in line.<br /><br />Other trellising systems have taller posts to allow for canes to be trained both up and down (to increase the yield), or are “Y” shaped at the top for the same reason. And, finally, there are some pruning systems that do not use trellises at all—just a trunk with canes coming out of the top like an umbrella. The last is seldom used today.<br /> </em><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9172679333867199767-6104530477971145928?l=www.pa59ers.com%2Fdavid%2Fwine%2Findex.htm'/></div>David Othmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13513434149140482587noreply@blogger.com1